Not so small world

When I was a child the world was big. I mean really big. So big it took me ten minutes to walk into town. The road swept gently upward as it went one mile into town. A mile was huge. But the neighbor and I made that trip many times. The world was huge, it took us a bit over ten minutes to DRIVE to church. Even farther away was the mall. It took us a whopping 45 minutes to get to there.

The halls of my school were massive corridors that were the arteries of the school. Students flowed like blood back and forth at certain times of the day. Try as we might, we could not even jump high enough to touch the ceilings. It took minutes to walk all the way from one end to the other so we could go outside and play. Then high school came and again we were dwarfed by the size. Ceilings were higher, our lockers were split, the tall upright area for you coat and stuff, and the wider top part for books, the top part was out of reach of many of us. But we slowly, year after year grew into the lockers. Soon the classrooms seemed smaller, the halls more crowded, then came graduation.

Suddenly we found the world bigger still but it got quickly smaller. As we got our licenses the mall didn't see the so far when we drove ourselves. Then colleges hours away and we drove into the bigger world. But even hours into a drive, something felt like it was shrinking. I remember when cell phones were rare. But as they got more and more popular, the distance between friends got smaller. Soon we had friends across the world, thanks to the Internet. Now i just feel the world has lost its bigness.

It sorta makes me sad that the world that once seemed so huge and amazing, now feels so small and... lame. I hate the fact that I had to grow up and am now part of the world. There are way to many things that  happen on the other side of the world, that are effecting my life, and the lives of everyone I know, and we have no say in it. Toxic waste being dumped into the ocean because of a nuclear problem. Putting chemicals into our foods and drinks that is known to cause cancer, make people fatter, and dumb us down. But this post isn't about those things. It is about how small the world is now.

The Phoenix from Star Trek: First Contact. Doesn't seem to hard to make.

I guess whoever wrote "It's a Small World After All" really knew a thing or two about life. I really do hope mankind manages actual space travel soon, I want to feel the wonder of how big everything is again. I want to be a kid and complain that something is ten minutes away. I would really love to complain that something is 10 light-years away. Come on Zefram Cochrane, make a warp engine already. Let's get us to the stars. Let's feel so small again, let's be small kids in a giant galactic playground.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

So, I love Neil Gaiman. Though I wish I could say I have been reading him for years, in truth it probably has only been three maybe four. I started off reading his Sandman series of comics. Right away I was hooked, and a few short weeks later, I owned all the issues of the graphic novels. I right away went into the extra graphic novel one offs about Death (Who I happen to adore. I never knew death would be so cute and fun.) and into several others that I could get ordered in. I then went into the books. I read through his adult books, but still couldn't get enough so I started buying the teen's books, and the children's books.

So of course you could say I was looking forward to his next book. When I purchased The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I was in the middle of reading three other books. So I set it on my desk and let it wait until I was ready to read it. Weeks past and I found myself piling stuff on top of the book. I still wanted to finish the books I was reading, but every time I was in the bookstore, I saw the book and wanted to read it. So I finally broke down and opened the book.

Before I go into the book, I want to go over why it took me weeks to finish any book. The three books I was reading were very different, one was a fiction book by Brent Weeks (By the way, I would recommend to everyone to read his Night Angel trilogy. Very good, but be warned, some parts are rather brutal but still worth reading every bit.) I didn't want to stop reading it because I have already put it on the back shelf several times. Then I was reading two other books inspired by God and Christian life. It was hard enough to find time to read these around work and WoW.

Anyways, I opened the book and started reading. It was a week night, but I didn't have to get up early for work, so I kept reading. Three in the morning comes around I found I wasn't tired but I should go to sleep anyways. At this point I was between a third and a half of the way through. Then the next night, I didn't care I had to get up, I read until I finished.

My very first thought when I was done: "My that simply a delightful book." Most of the time, I tend to relate myself to the characters of the book, but I didn't this time (Even though it was in first person.) I just let myself be absorbed by the book. I didn't want it to end.

The strange little girl Lettie was my favorite character. How she said obscure things as matter of fact, and her maturity (for who knew how long she had been eleven) made me smile every time she came onto the page.

I found something very connecting in the book. It didn't feel so much like a book to me, but more of a recollection of my childhood. Now, I sadly did not have an ocean at the end of my road. But I had a fortress on top of a small building. I didn't know secrets of the universe, but I knew secrets of the Ways of the Ninja. The whole time I read, I felt like it was my memories. I wasn't the characters, but I was reading about a life that could have been my own, in a different time. I really felt happy while I read.

I do not want to give the story away, so if you are at all interested, go pick up a copy and read the dust jacket. Do not set the book down, but instead walk right up to the cashier and hand him or her your money or card. After doing so, take the newly purchased book back home and sit down and read. It is not a long book. I was actually really surprised how small it was. But it was just the right size because the world inside was much bigger than you could guess.

As always, Thanks for reading.




Picture is from neilgaiman.com

The End of an Era

A big problem I am having with World of Warcraft is the game itself. I am not finding the fun get-away from the world content anymore. When I first started playing, I wanted to do it all, I played and learned. I was doing quests, running dungeons, getting into battle grounds, and when I maxed out my levels, I was going into raids. It was fun.

Then with the introducing of heirlooms, The battle grounds lost their fun. I went from being able to actually compete with everyone else, to being killed in one shot from a rogue. I am not a fan of heirlooms. I think they break the balance of the game. Now, if you do not have them you can't even damage the enemy. So I stopped playing in the battle grounds. On a side note, I hadn't played a battle ground at max level until I hit 90 with my guild, they are a lot more fun with a group, even though we all sucked. But the horrible taste on my tongue is still there from the lower levels.

That is me in the number one spot before heirlooms

Then I tried to get into raids. I joined an upstart guild where we began to plan our raiding schedule. The guild grew nicely but unfortunately we were absorbed into a bigger raiding guild. They quickly made me feel like I hated raiding. I didn't want to raid with them because people quickly got mad over small things. Even being in the top five dps with little gear, if you didn't do it they way the leader wanted it, you sucked. If you missed two days you were removed from the guild. Which I was removed from the guild. I couldn't have been happier.

The raiding guild took what fun should have been killing Arthas and made me want to become the Lich King myself and kill them all. I tried to keep in touch with most of the guys from the guild, but that soon became hard to do as I was now looking elsewhere for a server.

Then came Cataclysm. I didn't think it was a terrible expansion, but now that I was done with end game raiding for a while, I spent my time doing quests and dungeons. The dungeons were not as interesting to me as the Lich King ones, but I still tried them out. I got yelled at by a healer for sucking when I told them I have never been here, and just made the gear requirement. They refused to explain the boss fight. I was still number two dps on the bosses. The attitude I have seen over the years with the game has been going down hill, the nice people, for the most part, have left the game, leaving only childish brats and guys who just sit in a city trolling trade chat.

With dungeons now being something I hate to even queue for, I went head long into quests. I found that they quickly became repetitive. But I had fun doing them. Exploring the new worlds, I loved that. Vashj'ir was beautiful but repetitive. Being stuck underwater, though you could move faster, got tiresome about half way through the zone. But I kept working and one by one completed all the zones, four times. Then I went to work on maxing the reputations.

The joy of exploring is finding shots like these

The game went from repetitive to grinding very quickly then. The dailies ate at my soul until my love for quests were gone. So I spent most of my time in Orgrimmar sitting on buildings waiting for my friends to get on so I could talk to someone. During this miserable time, I met someone and started falling for them. It was a mistake, and I should have seen it coming, but I went for it anyways. I still value her as a friend, but what was once a best friend, a "bbf" as it were for us, now is not much more than talking once every six months.

So as she pulled away from me, I quickly found myself sitting, logged in, on buildings or flying around in circles and loops, doing the occasional daily until I hated everything about them. Then I moved a toon to the Alliance and found Gentle Persuasion.

For the end of Cata, I was happy and enjoying the game finally. After about a year, I felt like I belonged and it was fun. Got back into dungeons, we started to raid, I did all the quests I could find and life in WoW was good. Pandaria came out and I was living high with my new friends and guild. We started to get a bit more serious about raids and I quickly remembered how much I hated them. But I was with friends and I was happy.

I did the quest line only once. I could not standing doing it another time, though I was excited to do each part as I went. They really were a great set of quests in Pandaria. But to me only worth one time through. The dungeons were OK, they brought back some of the enjoyment I had, but I give that credit to the company I was with not the dungeons themselves. But then the end game stuff came.

I don't think the game does anything wrong with it, I just find I am not the same person I was when I started playing. Which is a good thing and a bad thing. Good that I am growing up, maturing, become more than I was when I started playing but bad that something I loved so dearly for so long has become something I wish would just die. So I guess the game hasn't really gone bad. Just my love has.

I understand that parts of this are similar to what I had wrote in the last post, but I wanted to share why I dont like certain aspects of the game anymore. So sorry if the post was a bit redundant, I think next I will work on something not WoW related. But then again, the nice thing about having a blog, I write whatever  I want :)

As always, Thanks for reading.